


No Hero's War

by XtaticPearl



Series: Phoenix and Eagle - MCU [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The First Avenger, Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 05:22:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14157687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XtaticPearl/pseuds/XtaticPearl
Summary: There is a pause between grief and guilt, something so cold that Steve tries to remember the beginning of this unending war. In an empty bar with shadowed chairs, he puts on a uniform and puts down his shields.





	No Hero's War

**Author's Note:**

> This is my MCU tribute to CATFA.

It isn't his first funeral and as Steve walks into a bar of none, he wonders what it said about his life that he was so imbrued in death. The olive uniform was pristine in its freshness, as much as the pain of losing -

"Fuck," he swears into the echoing stillness of darkness and shuffles himself towards a table he could sit at. The chairs are upturned and a mess, the unkempt aura of the place a reflection of the world he comes back home to after every day between minefields. His fingers grip the wood of the chair for a second, a moment of numbed feet and lost direction making him dizzy. The moment faded and he had to get back into his own skin, the stretched out muscle that wasn't his and the strength that didn't match his inner emptiness.

Bucky would call him dramatic. Bucky wouldn't call him anything anymore. 

For the first time since his father's funeral, a grey day of December rain, Steve picks up a bottle to drown. He had tasted drinks during the stolen moments of laughter that Bucky and Arnie and the other lads who spared him a second glance of friendship dragged him to. In second-hand versions of classy bars, after a long night of washing dishes at the diner down the street; he had wet his tongue on cheap beer and tame liquor. But he hadn't drowned, hadn't fallen into a numbness that would spit back some soul into his body. 

He pours the unattended whiskey and drinks, a dead man's guilt across an empty audience. 

Morita had agreed to cover for him for an hour but Steve wonders if his word mattered anymore, with the record of his failures longer than the flash of his victories. The glass is cool against his palm, a slippery friction of sweat and condensation, but Steve burns as his fingers still know the ghost of a slipped grasp. 

He hears laughter from outside and it sounds like Bucky's scream. It feels like Erskine's last heartbeat fading away into nothing. 

The world is in colour but all Steve sees is red. He wishes he didn't have the serum so know what red felt like against white cotton.

He's well into his fourth glass when he realizes that his eyes don't sting because of the sweat. The tears are surprising and for a passing moment, Steve wonders if he looks as ugly as he did when he cried in thinner skin. The little Irish boy who would wipe sweat and tears onto the same sleeve so the world wouldn't know the difference. 

Erskine was a bastard, he decides as he sips his sixth glass, the amber poison doing nothing to his nerves. His cuff-links clink against the table when he shifts his arms and Steve imagines the sound of the bells and whistles that Bucky heard even after his shifts at the docks. 

_"It's like being a dog," Bucky groused as he sat beside Steve in the art class that had turned into a flirting ground for Bucky, making Steve his uninterested wingman more than a student. Steve kept his eyes on the model and shifted the pencil between his fingers before sketching again. He'd love to get some new graphite but his medicines weren't free and being a nurse's son only went so far to get him discounts._

_"I told Michael that I need some damn muffs if I'm gonna work anywhere near his station from now," Bucky continued not really interested in feedback as long as he got to vent, "The old geezer's damn yodeling doesn't help either."_

_"How much are you itching to take the next fight at the club?" Steve asked as he frowned down at his sheet and edged the curves slower, "And I don't wanna know the ones you've got on bet with Arnie."_

_"Dot's gonna be my date for the one on Friday," Bucky said, smug and grinning, winking when the model eyed him. Steve suppressed a smirk of his own when the model simply ignored the charm. "Told ya the bear'd work."_

_Steve refused to comment on that and let the silence linger for as long as Bucky would let it. The bear had cost them their train fare and Steve wasn't sure if a date was worth that. Bucky, as usual, had different priorities and Steve thought that one day he'd meet a gal who would knock him off his charm._

_He'd kinda pay money to see **that**_ **.**

 

The choke in his throat squeezed out more tears and Steve swallowed them with the whiskey that ran like water down his throat. He would never get to see Bucky finding the one of his dreams, or being teased over awkward flirting. He'd never get to be his wingman, the one who got to one-up him when he finally scored a date with someone who was right to dance with. There would be no more kin, no more adopted families sewn together by stubbornness. 

He wished Erskine had let him take that vodka shot. One last toast to the man who Steve didn't see anymore in the mirror. 

There was a plan to brief over after this. Another attack, another foray into the bowels of death. Another rally of friends over uncertain intelligence. Morita, Dugan, Gabe, Jacques - they'd all hold a vacant seat for Bucky but still look at Steve to tell them when to fight.

When to lay down over a wire and let the rest crawl over them. 

He felt disgusted with himself even as he thought that. He hadn't taught them to be brave. He hadn't taught any of them to be the men they were and to think that he had any claim to their valor, to their values -

Steve took a long swallow of his drink and hated Bucky for being brave, even as he knew that it was never the dead's fault. 

When Peggy breaks the melancholy he has built over an empty chair and a fast-emptying bottle, he doesn't have the strength to fight her. To prove her wrong the way he has been fighting to do with everyone he has met till date. There is no worthiness in the wake of the worthless war and he shuts his eyes briefly when she tells him to respect Bucky's choice. 

To respect the choice of those who let him live over them.

There is a faint pressure over his heart, on the point where a dying Erskine had touched to seek a final vow. Steve never understood that vow or Erskine much for that matter, but he thinks he can try now. 

A soldier had failed his comrade on a train. 

Maybe a good man would stop this chain of sacrifices once and for all. 

He nods when Peggy lays a warm hand over his in quiet sharing of grief and hopes that she'd forgive him.

For trying to be a hero in a war that had laid waste to greater men.

The empty bottle stays when Steve leaves the bar behind, storing his grief in his veins to be frozen. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This oneshot can be expanded into a fuller fic if you guys would like to see it. Please let me know in your feedback.


End file.
